


While We While Our Nightmares Away

by Senri



Category: Blade of the Immortal
Genre: Angst, Gen, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:03:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contains SPOILERS for current BotI chapters.  What Renzo does, how he lives, and what his nights are like, after the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	While We While Our Nightmares Away

After Shira – after he's gone – Renzo goes on. It's not as if there's much else left for him to do.

Some days he's not sure why he's not dead himself. The other days, he's just not sure of anything at all, and being unsure is likely the thing that keeps him going anyway so maybe it's all for the best in the long run. These days, waking up is like stepping off the last stair in the dark, without realizing it's the last. So there's a jolt, rising out of his dreams. Every time.

He stays with Rin in her old dojo. She has a job, he thinks; that is, sometimes she's gone, always anxiously, telling him to stay close to the house and take care with the fire. Renzo crouches in the dust then, and draws whorls and spirals in the earth with the tips of his fingers, like his father used to do with ink on his masks, and sometimes his blood. Curls and curves, a tapestry of texture, zen garden engravings on the dusty yard. They disappear with the rain, or when people walk into the courtyard to visit, as sometimes they do.

Occasionally, men visit Rin. He watches them and listens closely, but he does not think she is selling herself; when they come to the yard and Rin tells him with a tight smile impressed around her eyes to stay close and be careful, and slides the door shut, closing herself and whatever man visits into the front room, there is only the faint murmur of conversation, not the grunts and hitched breaths of passion (which he knows, by now, so well, so well, so well…)

When whatever man who is visiting comes out – there are only ever two men who visit – he will bow to Rin, and she to him, still standing on the porch so her head is above his, and her shadow eclipses him.

The one man has hair spiked into a cockerel's proud tail. "Poor bastard," is how he refers to Renzo, as in, "How's the poor bastard holding up?"

Rin is very kind. "His name's Renzo," she says to this, reprovingly, the first time he listens. Renzo inclines his head closer to the door and holds his breath. Clinking noises resound – Rin must be setting up the tea set.

"Yeah, I know." A pause. "I know what that asshole liked doing to people too."

"He's not a bastard, either way." And he isn't, Renzo knows. These kinds of distinctions are important to Rin, and to him too, so he appreciates it.

"Whatever. How're you holding up?"

"I'm fine, of course." A hint of irritation, coated with politeness. "And you? How are you doing? That that man? How's he, these days?"

Renzo traces a circle with his toes on the floorboards of the porch. Spiky snorts. "Still alive," he says. "Don't go getting your hopes up."

"You know I'm done with that. For a while now."

"What, with hoping?"

Renzo doesn't need to be in there to see the reproving glance Rin must be giving the man. And eventually: "Yeah, yeah… well… old habits. Sorry."

Not sorry. Not unfriendly, but not sorry.

When the conversation takes a direction that Renzo doesn't understand, he retreats back to the yard. Scratches at the ground til the door slides open again and Rin calls him to come get the tea and leftover sweets.

Spiky roughs up his hair kind of hard-gentle, the way guys do with kids now and again. Renzo's not much of a kid at this point but he lets it slide anyway, bows his head under the hard palm and flops his head around. What the hell happened to you, sometimes he wants to ask that. Who the hell do you think you are? But he can see in the guy's narrow eyes that right here, he does feel sorry.

"Lucky you, kid," Spiky says, before leaving again. "Wish someone like Rin'd been around for me'n my sister. Don't spit on her kindness."

Renzo doesn't. He never does. He tries not to. How could he? How couldn't he? How would his life be different if he'd never met her… if he'd lost an ear, instead of his father.

She calls him again. He goes, eats the leftovers and gets his hands sticky. His fingers want to stick together afterward. The skin pulls, when he stretches out his hands, opens his fingers up towards the sun.

The other guy wears his hair long, pulled back from his narrow face. His robe is sea-green and threadbare in places. Rin never looks at Renzo when this guy comes to call. Just touches his head with her hand, her eyes hard on this long-haired man.

Snake-eyes doesn't call Renzo a bastard. He bows whenever he steps into their territory.

Rin sends Renzo out with just a push, like putting a lit candle into the water, to dwindle away into the night. With this man it's all grown-up talk, grown-up walk, no cursing but still tea. They trade quiet words like precious stones.

"Have you got a plan?" that man asks her. "The money won't hold out forever."

Rin's voice is low. Polite. "I suppose I'll marry. My parents didn't leave me a pauper." In the silence, Renzo hears a wince. Rin is more skilled with rhetoric than she's ever been with a sword.

"Have you seen your yojimbo recently?"

"I've seen him."

Silence. The chink-chink of the fine old china.

Renzo draws galaxies in the dust. Thinks of blood staining canvas, staining paper dried out of pulp, staining a mask ruddy, running bright on skin. Fingertips trailing over his spine. Blunt fingertips peeling up strips of his skin, his entire body resounding with pain, pain, pain. A figure blocking out the light. The glassy white of hair. The eggshell off-white of bone.

Father, he thinks. Father. Araya. Who were you before you were with me?

His father also wore his hair long. But not tied back. But like this man's, as black as a winter lake. White snowflakes, huge, puffy as goose down, drifting from above and melting seamlessly into the water.

The end of a dock. The bare sight of fingers swollen and loosely curled, wrists abraded by help rope. A body riding low in the water.

Araya used to cradle Renzo's head against his sharp hipbone, and whisper him to sleep. Araya was all muscle, and bone close to his skin. A wily man with a fox smile, who sometimes wore a fox mask.

Don't let samurai scare you, son, he used to say. You don't need to be born into the blood to swing a sword good'r better than those paper soldiers.

Renzo remembers.

Snake-eyes doesn't have a terrible lot to say to him. No hair-ruffling, no promises, no apologies. He just comes out and watches Renzo with eyes as narrow and appraising as a wolf's.

He bows to Renzo, too. Like he's paying real respect. Bows til his forehead almost smirches with dust. For his own part Renzo wonders what the hell is up with that, but he bows back anyhow.

Summer nights, and Rin breathes near-silent, steady, in the night. She might be asleep and she might not be. She's alert to his movement, like someone who's got used to waking up fast, to listening closely. Like someone who doesn't rest easy on the world.

Renzo kicks off his quilt. Sprawls in his sleeping clothes in the rain-licked night air. Spreads his arms, watches the shadows, the ceiling. His mouth pangs with metal taste, and his stomach kicks and spasms like a leather ball abused by children.

Shira crouches at the foot of his futon, just like he used to – with his eyes in shadow, his ugly grin in full display. Renzo watches, watches him. Burning the midnight oil. Drags his fingers in swoops and swirls over his own stomach, digs at his skin with his fingernails, reminding.

"You're never gonna get away from me, kiddo," the shadow who was once a man says. "Doesn't matter how you run – just that if there's one thing that pisses me off in the world, it's a snot-nosed little brat who thinks he can get away from me scot-free…"

Rin turns over and exhales. Long, long and low. Shira glances over at her. Renzo knows that this man hates her, hates her like he hates everybody. Like he hates Renzo, and here he is just ready to blow a hot puff of breath and burn him to a crisp. Renzo's hair is soaked with sweat, weak-blooded like usual. Renzo's skin is slippery under his robe. Renzo is going to get cold, when the nightmare leaves. If it does. Eventually.

I outran you, Renzo thinks. Or, no. He was lifted up and carried, the person hauling him not glancing back for a second at the screaming, whooping demon roaring after them. A demon who's a dead thing, now. Dead and cold, maybe only bones, like any living thing.

Shira creeps out when the morning comes, the sun on his robe blending into the one rising over the horizon. Renzo breathes in, out. Closes his gritty eyes. He wakes to Rin cooking, heating up leftovers for their breakfast. She is very pale and fine in the early morning light. Light coalesces on her skin, and shadows puddling bluely in her collarbones. She looks much older. Her hair is down, framing her small face. She's wearing her robe, the old red one with the blue flames, worn thin at the knees.

Big sister, he calls her these days. She takes good care of him, as best she can. She knows what it's like, having lost both parents, although he still doesn't know the full circumstances.

Now, he hugs her tight, swallowing the knot that ties itself in his vocal chords. Spirals and blobs of light dance in his vision. Everything runs so hot and red sometimes… Rin turns around and pets him gently, running her thin scarred fingers through his hair.

By day, the nightmare absconds. Leaves him until the next night that Shira's restless ghost rises. Rin looks so tired sometimes it scares him. He's just dancing on the edge of her story… a burden, a responsibility. She bears the burdens she takes, and bears them with shoulders unbowed.

Most of what Renzo remembers, after these nights, is being hefted up with more attention to quickness than care, and someone husking, in a voice indeterminate, commands into his hair: _get up, son. Keep moving. Keep on running til that well runs dry._


End file.
